


shiver

by natesfangs (golden_we)



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: (lowkey) - Freeform, Anger Sex, Angst, Cunnilingus, Discussion of the supernatural, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Love Triangle route, Making Out, Praise Kink, Riding, Vaginal Fingering, and apparently nate finds that hot!, but it's still sexy angery, but she's not angry with nate lol, literally it's just a list of what's going to happen, long ass foreplay, sexy pine trees, shitty mother daughter relationships, the riding is the sexy kind babey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:02:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24816547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/golden_we/pseuds/natesfangs
Summary: after a dangerous act of rebellion, nate and the detective have a conversation about her belief in the supernatural. and then they don’t talk at all.
Relationships: Detective/Nathaniel "Nate" Sewell, Female Detective/Nathaniel "Nate" Sewell
Comments: 6
Kudos: 75





	shiver

**Author's Note:**

> kind of a rewrite of the scene in book one after rebecca comes to visit the detective at her apartment, after the ‘ub are vampires’ reveal but before the [spoiler] by murphy. my detective (chloe yan) has an extremely poor relationship with her mother and is a skeptic regarding the supernatural. she's on the love triangle route with feelings for both nate and adam at this point, but this fic is heavily nate-focused.
> 
> this is my first wayhaven fic and i hate writing smut so go easy on me, i'm baby. kudos and comments very appreciated.
> 
> hang with me on tumblr: @realmswalker.

Step by agonising step, she returns to her apartment. 

_Pace yourself_ , _darling heart of my heart_ , the woman who was meant to have raised — taught — protected — her (instead of throwing her to, if not the wolves, creatures with _fangs_ )who should have never lied to her, who she can never forgive now, would say when she was a child. 

Shame and fury run cold in Chloe’s blood (her dangerous blood, her — what had they said? Mutated blood. _Mutant_. They did not insult her, but they did not have to: the word itself is enough of an insult, she wears it searing red on her chest, hung from her neck, choking her.) whistling and stinging across her cheeks. 

The feeling heady in her veins, that tears through her and leaves her doubled over on the pavement outside her building, breath exhaled in white gasps, reminds her of the sharp slide of a winter wind across smooth face-skin and the slow static snowfall of her mother’s — Rebecca’s — voice, reverberating around the thick of her skull, sticking dark and heavy in the back of her mind, their last conversation (the one about — _creatures_ ) playing on a loop.

They’re waiting inside the apartment. Unit Bravo. Their silhouettes paint her window. 

All she feels is the biting chill of grief unlike any she has ever know; mourning the detective who knew so little and believed she knew so much, who could look at Nate — Agent Sewell, _fuck_ — and let a smile slide her mouth open even as she wished it might be his tongue parting her lips instead. 

The last time she was left out in the cold, Adam — Agent du Mortain, fuck, his name sticks in her head too — draped his coat over her shoulders and — now, she is thinking him of something he isn’t. _Human_. He is more dangerous than she could have imagined. Not just merely infuriating. Her instincts were wrong.

All of Chloe’s instincts were wrong.

She swallows past something hard in the hollow of her throat, hard and hot and electrified, her body a live wire, jolts of pain shocking through her when she reaches into her pocket for her key. She feels small like this, palm curled around the knob of the door to the building she’s lived in for long enough to think of as ‘home’ whenever she has to, shoulders bent forward, knees weak, ribs raw and aching. Half of it is from going out when she shouldn’t have. Three-quarters. Seven-eighths. The remains are easily Rebecca’s fault.

(’Pace yourself,’ her mother would have said, if she caught her slipping out, ‘a head wound doesn’t miraculously heal itself, _Chlo-birdy-doll-daughter-thing_.’)

The front door sticks. She forces it open with her shoulder. The stairs that lead to her floor are longer than she remembers them being. Her tanned cheeks are flushed a darker shade from effort when she sees her reflection glaring back at her, silver-tinted and bruised-looking.

Her apartment door opens before she’s managed to fit the key in the lock.

Du Mortain’s lip is curled in a snarl. He looks rabid like that. “Don’t you ever —”

She sets her bag by the door, ignoring his expression, ducking under his arm, and that seems (naturally) to make the agent even more irritated with her. “I needed groceries. Unlike you, I can’t survive on —” _Blood_. The word dies on her tongue. She can’t say what he is aloud, even, much less how he feeds himself. “If you needed to find me, you would have. But you’re still here. It was one block. I’m an adult. I don’t need babysitters.”

He has cut-glass cheekbones and furious eyes, Adam. (And here she is, thinking of him as Adam again, because he’s reined himself in, and is looking at her with his lips in a tight line now, and he looks a lot like Rebecca when he looks at her like that.) 

“Chloe.” Syrupy, honeyed voice that sings her to sleep, echoing in her dreams — Nate, saying her name as she thinks his, before du Mortain can say anything else with his sharp tongue, slash her to ribbons and leave Nate to sew the pieces back together. “I know that it’s not ideal, but we’re here to protect you. It’s not safe for you to go out alone.”

Chloe rounds on him. If they were sparring, her fists would be held at her chin, and her gaze held on his. “Because you expect me to believe that you’re — that there’s a man, out there, who wants to suck my mutant blood, and you’re the only ones who can save me from him? No. I don’t believe you.”

That creature, the one her mother showed her — the memory of it always flickers. She’s half convinced herself it was an illusion. A dream. Somehow, she’s still unconscious in Nate’s arms on the floor at the station. She’ll wake up soon.

“Chloe.” Her name, again, but from a different mouth: Rebecca is in the kitchen, hands slipped into her pockets, shoulders slumped magnanimously forward. “I know you’re angry, darling. But be angry with me, please. Not Agent Sewell, not Agent du Mortain. They’re here to protect you. Whether you want to believe it or not. Please help yourself. Please let us help you do that.”

People who know her mother usually can’t wait to tell her how alike they are, that Chloe Yan is Rebecca Yan’s spitting image, same rounded dark eyes that seem to glow in the sunlight and smooth skin and pink lips, both tall, fine-featured, elegant women. She dyes her hair blonde. Her mother doesn’t. People who know Rebecca still compare them anyway, her mother’s face the relentless ghost she will never be rid of.

“I don’t want to deal with you,” Chloe spits. There’s a blur of white motion at her side. Adam. “ _Any_ of you. Get out. Get out!” Her shoulders tremble with the weight and expectation of a demand she knows will never be answered. 

_They say they’re protecting her. Whether she believes they are what they say, what Rebecca said, they are or not_. They will not leave, because they do not answer to her.

There’s that stinging, whipping wind feeling in the bridge of her nose again. Terror. Tears. 

She bows her head, jaw clenched, teeth set on edge. She will not cry in front of Rebecca. Unit Bravo — whether they are, as claimed, ‘protecting her’ or not — are not entitled to witness her at her most fragile, years of simmering frustration with her absent mother and anger at the infuriatingly casual way her mother spilled the world’s secrets and the stitch in her side aching. 

It’s hard to breathe like this: holding her breath (of course) until her lungs ache, crouched against a wall by her door and so close to her kitchen but unable to reach it, unmoving as she is moved past, not listening to the chords of whispered conversation, catching only the looks shared between Unit Bravo’s members and her mother and failing, again ( _inadequate inadequate inadequate_ , Rebecca did not tell her sooner because she did not deserve to know, she was _inadequate_ ) to understand the language the agents speak with each other.

Morgan leaves first, cigarette clenched in the gap between two fingers and already smouldering, glowing red with heat. Hauville follows, the quirk that usually looks settled on her pretty mouth suddenly out of place. Du Mortain and Rebecca hesitate, each in their own way; it’s the half second when it seems Adam almost looks back that makes her chest seize. One by one. Limb by stretched limb. The agents pace themselves out of her apartment. 

Nate — Agent Sewell — remains. He closes the door.

And then they are alone, him a few inches from her, his boots scuffing her floor, approaching her, still pressed into the wall, with the caution of a man who has lived a least a few good centuries longer than the idiots who sit next to her and ask stupid questions about working for the Wayhaven Police Department, as if that’ll impress her. He smells like cloves, a spicy aftershave?, and earth. Strong, warm, clean things. So close she can count all the hairs on his jaw.

Chloe tries to mind that he has stayed. She does not.

He touches her head, fingers threaded through her hair, and they both inhale so sharply when he does it that both the motion of her breath and sound of his gasp leave her dizzy.

“I’ll go,” Nate exhales first, pulling his hand away, a branch fragment studded with stray pine needles clutched between his fingers. She can see them, sharp, between his thumb and forefinger, plucked carefully from her tangled hair — there’s a block of unmanicured, unruly Wayhaven forest at the foot of her street, and the ground is littered with little bits of pine, alive green and dead yellow. The ones he clutches are a emerald shade. _Alive_.

He wasn’t going to stay. He was untangling a twig from her hair. Now, instead of clenching and doubling her over, there’s a swooping feeling in her stomach, a hurtling back down to earth from satellite orbit kind of feeling.

She tips her head back to look at him properly and almost touches his bottom lip with the same open-mouthed awe that must have compelled him to touch her hair, even if only to pull a branch from its tendrils.

“ _You_ can stay,” she says, touching her own head instead of his mouth, toying with a loop of her hair, avoiding his gaze as she says it. “I just — I don’t — it’s overwhelming. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. I can’t think. I need to think. I didn’t think.” Her tone flattens by the end of the strung out sentence, quieting her. 

Nate takes her by the wrist, his fingers curling around it, thumb stroking a hard knot of bone in a way that feels both practiced and unintended, instinctive. “I know, Chloe. Detective. Adam —”

“I don’t want to talk about Adam,” Chloe says, quietly, finding his eyes. 

“You’re shivering,” he volleys back, palms cupping her shoulders, “Come on.” She could have sworn that ‘on’ was going to be a ‘here’. “We should warm you up. You must be hungry.”

The agent guides her through her own apartment with a familiarity that would be discomforting to see on Adam’s features — anyone else. She rarely has visitors. She can count the number of times Rebecca has visited her on a single hand. She spends as little time here as possible. It’s dull, her apartment, the walls a thin, pale colour, floor bearing boring IKEA furniture from the previous tenant, the space entirely uninviting except as Nate guides her through it. In his wake, it blossoms and bursts open, her curtains fluttering. 

Kitchen table, a place he makes for her. She never sits down to eat. Kitchen sink. Refrigerator. She follows his movements with the tilt of her head, her breathing slowing as she watches the careful way he approaches making her dinner. 

“Nate?” He hums, and she pulls her knees to her chest in the chair she’s perched on, making herself smaller. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have — I didn’t mean to yell at you. Earlier.”

“You didn’t yell at me,” he turns his head for a moment, and she catches a glimpse of a wild spark of a grin, his whole face lit by it, “You yelled at Rebecca. And Adam.”

Chloe runs a fingertip along the edge of the table she never sits at. 

The silence is consuming. Not comfortable, but not easy, either. It seems to be the same kind of treacherous as slow suffocation: she’s going to tell him all her secrets. 

An inhale, a gasped, desperate prayer of a breath, precedes the confession. “I broke my ankle when I was 12. Fell. Rebecca didn’t know for two weeks. She came home, every night, and didn’t look at the cast on my foot, until I was too slow walking to the car the one morning she was driving me to school, and she finally saw it. I didn’t have a mother then. I don’t want a mother now.”

He stops moving. 

“I don’t have a mother either,” Nate says, smile soft and crooked, leaning back against her counter. She sees it in his gaze. The sentence hurts him to say aloud. “It’s nice to know we have that in common, you and I.”

“Do you ever miss yours?”

He comes closer to her, until his forearms are on her kitchen table (god, this table she never uses, and will use over and over again now, thinking of him stretched across it, stretching _her_ across it —) and he’s leaning over her. 

“Do you miss _your_ mum, Detective?” Nate asks, and the way his mouth rounds around the syllables, her syllables, makes her heartbeat spark back to life, hammering in her chest, between her ribs, in the palm of his hand. (He’ll hear that. She doesn’t care. She can’t bring herself to care anymore, he’s already taken so much from her.)

“The idea of her, maybe.” She doesn’t have to think. Her answer is entirely uncalculated. “The idea of someone who wouldn’t have — who wouldn’t have lied to me for my entire life. Who would have understood that protecting me doesn’t mean leaving me blind. I’m so mad at her, Nate. I’m furious. I don’t know if I can ever forgive her. I don’t want to.”

The agent drops to his knees on the floor next to her, and wraps his arms around her strange, huddled shape, resting his cheek on her shin. “You don’t have to,” he says, gently, “Not right now. I know that this is a lot for you to deal with —”

“I’m scared, Nate.”

A deadly kind of confession, an oxygen-thief, except he cannot drown like she can, tremours making her shake in his embrace. The last time he held her, in a dream, on the floor of the station, she was still. Will he remember her like this, centuries from now, when she is gone and he is not? Terrified?

The prospect of that is, itself, terrifying.

She breathes in shaking inhales, unfurling before him, finally prised apart, sliding her unsteady fingers through the soft, short locks of his hair and waiting for him to say something. She doesn’t have time to wait.

“Me too.” 

A whisper. Another prayer more dangerous now that it’s been spoken aloud. She gasps around the admission, bowing her head towards him in her lap. He doesn’t elaborate, and god, she couldn’t make him, she wouldn’t dare even to try. His stoicism is a of a different cloth than Adam’s, but she recognises the slip of it. It matches the faltering of hers. 

They share that, too. Fear and motherlessness. 

The kiss Chloe brushes over his knuckles, the hand he left braced on her thigh, is experimental; his skin tastes like something she could call only clean, and no pulse thrums steadily between two of her fingers. Her heart is going to burst out of her chest, and Nate must know this, because he rises from his places at her feet and kisses her on the mouth in her small kitchen chair, her legs dangling in the space between his, biceps flexing as he embraces her. 

She thought she would feel smaller in his arms. He’s vast. Bigger than she is. She feels tall, like Rebecca, and _so warm_.

And Nate kisses her like he’s been starving for a thousand years and she is everything he’s ever dreamed of consuming, swallowing down the grief that rises up from her throat and spreads golden and rotten like spoiled honey on her tongue before she can choke on a sob.

She feels him smile as he kisses her, her legs wrapped around his waist as he picks her up with such ease and grace that she feels truly, impossibly _light_ , his mouth endlessly, intoxicatingly sweet and leaving hers only to kiss at the corners of her mouth, and her cheeks, as he presses her into the wall, and her forehead, in the hallway, and in the entrance to her bedroom, and there is a hesitation as he does it that makes her know, for the first time, what he is.

Chloe has kissed too many people. She doesn’t remember most of their names now, lost in drunken adolescent blurs and weekend headaches that left her stumbling home in a dress from the night before and a stolen sock. All those people she wanted to fuck the old grief out of her who never succeeded. 

But she’s never been kissed like _this_.

His kisses undress her. Stitch her back together. Lap at her tears and the sweat that beads on the nape of her neck.

It’s hard to breathe again — she’s panting, as he wraps his hair around her hand and pulls gently on it to tip her head back so she’ll meet his gaze, somewhere in the vast wasteland between her kitchen-living room and her bedroom.

Nate’s gaze doesn’t falter, and when she shivers, struck by the warm, electric shade of his eyes, and the raw, undisguised hunger in them.

“Come here,” he says, throatily, finally, and she wonders if that’s from disuse (when did they last speak? When he trusted her with his secret as she trusted him with hers?) or because of _her_. “You’re so —” Her t-shirt, from a charity run, faded from a few years of wear, falls to the floor.

And — Nate _sighs_.

The way someone sighs at a beautiful thing. Awe and longing. _Desire_. Shock. Real and rare and uncalculated, mouth gaped as he looks at her, half-naked in the light, the top of her waist exposed now, almost her hipbones, and her stomach, and her ribs, and her lacy black bra, and her bare shoulders, he won’t have seen those, either. 

He trails a finger between her breasts, lowering his head to her throat.

She meets him halfway, hips pushing into his, a low moan rising from her chest like the moon that streaks in through her bedroom window in a soft golden shade. The stars are bright in Wayhaven. She’s never tried to count them before, but she traces every inch of the vast sky that is Nate’s bare chest, his t-shirt joining hers, like his body joins hers, and he picks her up by the waist again and presses her to the wall when her fingers brush over the rise of his cock, constrained by his jeans.

“Nate,” she pants, wanting to say his name again, and again, and again, to do it _right_ , to say it the same way he’s making her feel, fiery instead of cold, bright and burning through the black night like a shooting star, that word she always hated hearing people use to describe her, _hot_. “Bed. Please.”

He laughs against the collarbone he’s been sucking, a hickey bruised red and obvious on it, pressing his nose to her chest and inhaling. “’Please’,” he says, and she mewls as his hand slides down her side and slips past the top of her sweatpants, beneath the waistband of her underwear. “I don’t think I’ve _ever_ heard you say that, Chloe.”

He makes her name sound obscene. Those eyes —

His thumb is pressed to her swollen clit, large hand held in place by the various elastic bands of her half-dressed state, and she gasps, the sound becoming a moan, her eyelids fluttering. “Nate, please.” It has the cadence of a prayer. 

“Please _what_?” 

Chloe should have known. Another thing she should have known — he was so charming, his cockiness should be expected, she’s met so many men like him — she’s never met anyone like him — he’s right, she rarely says please, she rarely says _anything_ — 

She closes her eyes. 

His lips are on her ear. “I want to hear you,” he says, without pretense, sentence as ragged as any she could bring herself to say would be, “I like hearing your voice.”

“Touch me,” Chloe pants, hips rising again. They won’t make it to her bedroom.

“And?” He sets her down on solid ground, and her sweatpants pool at her feet, her underwear following. She’s left entirely naked before him, the curves of her hips and her thighs and the rounds of her breasts, and he gasps again, softer, subdued awe, that she knows would show on his face if she looked at him now. 

“Taste me.” If she thought she was burning hot before, he’s made her molten now, untouchable by anyone but him, “Lick me off your fingers. Tell me how good I taste.” A soft laugh. He doesn’t explain it, but he’s touching her thigh.

“And?” _Fuck_. She can’t stand up straight. She wants his cock in her mouth. 

“Ride you,” she can’t speak in full sentences anymore, he’s fallen back down to her knees and kisses the inside of her thigh in the middle of her hallway and she has nothing to hold onto but his close-cropped hair. “You inside me. Make you come. Again.”

He speaks to the outside edge of her ear again, lips brushing softly over her cheekbone. “And when do I get to make you come?”

“Nate!” It’s more of a whine than Chloe intends it, entirely too desperate, but something about the way he touches her face makes her open her eyes and stare back into his. And she remembers, the whispered words that seem to have been said a lifetime ago, in her kitchen, the most honest anyone has ever been with her. _Me too_. 

She barely knows him, but — she might be in love with him.

“Come here,” she says, throatily, tipping her head back and meeting the wall as he kisses down her chest, sinking slowly down. 

“I like where I am.” Nate’s grin from between her legs is her undoing, her hips bucking and the only language she remembers how to speak suddenly one comprised entirely of moans and the syllable of his name, sometimes stuttered or dragged out or abbreviated. 

There’s an immaculacy, somehow, to the way he touches her. A ritual. He kisses first, marking his targets, and his thumb draws across them next, and then his mouth again. From the insides of her thighs, her legs urged apart by his head, to the arousal that stains his fingers with her taste, his tongue circling her clit as she starts, again, to shake, the sounds she makes higher pitched, sounds she’s never made before. (Like — _please_.)

“So good,” he slurs as he rises, licking his fingers clean, like she told him to, and she doesn’t know what to say, breathless and coming down from her instinctive reaction, which is to yell his name and drop to her knees so hard she’ll bruise them and taste him too. 

He holds her steady, gaze locked on hers. “Do you want to taste you?” he murmurs, and when she nods, mouth still open, he slips a finger inside her again, her lips closing around it, sucking on it and looking up at him through her lashes. 

He can’t look away from her. Chloe wants to make him swear. She wants to goad it out of him, sweet creature that he is, with the sway of her hips alone.

“Nate —” she says, around his finger, and he withdraws it, and she feels empty everywhere.

“Ride me.” 

Somehow, she thinks, with shocking clarity, ‘bed now’. His fingers intertwined with hers, stumbling backwards into the bedroom. She wants him inside her. Condoms — lube — fuck her fragile fucking humanness — his pupils are swollen in the lamplight, his eyes a glowing shade of black.

Her hair falls forward, curtaining both of them, when she straddles his hips and leans over him, lowering herself onto his cock, mouth opening at the same time as his. She can see the points of his fangs. The feeling isn’t terror but — adoration. Admiration. _Want_ , unbridled and heavy as he fucks up into her, making her tits bounce, his palms holding her by the waist, his fingers digging in and leaving undoubted bruises. Him inside her feels uncomplicated. Right. Her eyes are going to roll back in her head if he stays in that position. 

“Nate, Nate, Nate —”

“Good,” he pants, “Fuck —”

 _She made him swear_. Chloe knows, in the haze of her building climax, in the rawness of his, that she will remember that she made him say that, to her, about her, and she’ll make him do it a thousand more times. 

And then he is coming, and she’s thinking about a future with him, stilling, hips rocking slow, tears pricking in the corners of her eyes as she throws her head back and he presses kisses to her naked stomach and her chest and brings her back down to earth with him.

 _Me too_. _Pace yourself._

Quietly, the terror returns, but — Nate’s body is warm on hers, and she is at least hot instead of cold now.


End file.
